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Reflections on my time at The Blog Herald

By Matt Craven on December 3, 2006

It’s now public that we’ve sold The Blog Herald to an undisclosed buyer.

I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on my time as Publisher at The Blog Herald.

Taking Over

When we first took over The Blog Herald on February 25th, 2006, we were coming in behind a very strong blogger in Duncan Riley. Duncan had an incredibly strong voice and was a real “brand”, so to speak in the blogosphere. It was also a tough time for us as we were struggling internally at BlogMedia over the direction we wanted to go and how best to get there. It was also a tough time for me personally as we were negotiating the purchase while my wife was in the hospital with a psychological issue. This didn’t exactly set us up for success.

Not long later, three members of BlogMedia moved on - making it easier to make decisions around Blog Herald but more difficult to get them completed because there were less members of the team involved.

Needless to say, we were a bit directionless for awhile. And the feedback that we were receiving from folks like Aaron Brazell wasn’t too far off the mark.

We also received alot of bad advice from many corners - which fortunately we discarded and chose to do our own thing. But it was entertaining to read posts by those who had never built a large blog giving us advice on what our voice should be like - to be “more professional”, to be “more snarky”, and to get into “video and podcasting”.. though we did ultimate launch a podcast.

New Voices

So, when we decided to get serious about what was going on at The Blog Herald, we started by hiring Aaron Brazell, our biggest critic at that time. After all, why not give the guy whose feedback was close to being spot on the chance to help turn things around?

Before long, we had also brought on a few other bloggers. And then we sent a team over to cover WordCamp. Hands down, we had the best coverage of any so-called blogging news service out there.

This is really where our turnaround came into place. Tony Hung, Jessica Doyle, Martin Neumann, Thord, and others joined as bloggers.

Everything just started to click… traffic went way up - and revenues came along with it…

Deciding to Sell

As I outlined over at my post announcing the sale of The Blog Herald, it wasn’t really our intention to sell The Blog Herald when we began strategically divesting our blog network. But once we were contacted by a few companies, it only began to make sense to us.

I was in the most relaxed environment possible when we were discussing the final decision whether or not to sell - in small town Indiana at my parents’ home. It was here - somewhat removed from the blogosphere that it all just came together. And so we moved ahead and accepted the high bidder.

The Big Lessons

In the end, I think what we learned from our ownership of The Blog Herald can be summed up as follows:

• First, when following an existing blogger with a strong voice such as Duncan Riley, make sure that you have a solid plan in place for how you will be filling the void left by that voice.
• Second, having many different voices involved in a site is a very good thing. The current stable of bloggers at The Blog Herald rocked my world - they made the site the success that it was.
• Third, underpromise, and overdeliver. For a number of reasons, we had made public some changes that we were going to make - including a new theme and some new bloggers - and then this took us months to actually pull off. Next time around, I’ll say little about what we’re doing until we’re ready to unveil it.
• Finally, to hell with the haters. Listen to your audience, but make sure that you’re following your own heart - your own advice. We had folks telling us to do just about everything except pay attention to our core. Ignore them. Do it your way.

What’s next…

I will continue blogging here at Problogging - and you’ll see my return to podcasting over at The Pod Herald. In fact, my first podcast is live over there right now…

A Final Word for the Haters out there

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